Guided Pathway

In Virgil’s opening narration of the storm, the word ‘fate’ repeats five times in forty lines. We are in the midst of fate’s tempest in this panel too. What did fate mean, to Virgil, to Warburg? What role does the concept of fate play in the political imaginary? Benveniste, in his exploration of fas, fate, in Indo-European Language and Society, connects the root etymologically to fari, to speak, and shows how its meaning related to impersonal speech, speech with no human source. Fas is the power of speech in itself. In this way it developed towards the notion of divine will, and hence to divine law. The law that derived from the speech of gods constituted the human limit, the extent of historical possibility. So Neptune restores Aeneas to his allotted limit, to his story, but he does so by opening a breach in his own godly speech. This foundational ambivalence is misrecognized in the long story of political appropriations of the sea god as a protective figure of power by marine republics such as Venice and the Netherlands. [images 12.1, 12.2, 13] On the one hand Neptune reveals the power of restraint and conscious distancing, the sober withdrawal from action, and on the other hand he becomes the figure of naval victory. Warburg’s image-work tends to the revelation of such an obscured paradox within western authority and law itself.